I Built a $29/mo Alternative to $800 Enterprise Social Listening Tools

Source: Dev.to

The Problem with Enterprise Social Listening Tools

Enterprise social listening tools are absurdly expensive:

• Brandwatch: $800–$3,000 /month (annual contract required)
• Meltwater: $7,000–$40,000 /year
• Sprinklr: Custom enterprise pricing

The buying process typically involves filling out a form, waiting for a sales call, sitting through a demo, and negotiating an annual contract—none of which is feasible for indie hackers and startups.

Raw scrapers can give you tweets, but they provide no analysis. You would still need to build sentiment detection, intent classification, and other features yourself.

Chat‑only Grok APIs often hallucinate when asked about real data:

“As an AI, I don’t have access to real‑time data…”

That isn’t useful for actionable insights.

Grok X Intelligence API

Grok X Intelligence combines real X/Twitter data with Grok AI analysis. It offers four pre‑built tools:

What makes it different?
Most “Grok APIs” are just chat wrappers that can’t see X. This API uses xAI’s x_search tool to query actual posts and return real URLs, engagement numbers, and sentiment analysis.

Example: Brand Monitoring

import requests

url = "https://grok-x-intelligence.p.rapidapi.com/grok_x_monitor"

response = requests.post(
    url,
    json={"brand": "YourBrand", "timeframe": "24h"},
    headers={
        "x-rapidapi-key": "YOUR_KEY",
        "x-rapidapi-host": "grok-x-intelligence.p.rapidapi.com",
        "Content-Type": "application/json"
    }
)

print(response.json())

Sample response

{
  "brand": "YourBrand",
  "summary": {
    "total_mentions": 47,
    "sentiment": {"positive": 32, "neutral": 12, "negative": 3}
  },
  "posts": [
    {
      "url": "https://x.com/user/status/123456",
      "text": "Just tried YourBrand and it solved my problem",
      "sentiment": "positive",
      "engagement": {"likes": 45, "retweets": 12}
    }
  ]
}

The response includes real posts, URLs, and sentiment analysis.

Example: Intent Detection

response = requests.post(
    "https://grok-x-intelligence.p.rapidapi.com/grok_x_intent",
    json={"topic": "CRM software", "intent_type": "buying"},
    headers={
        "x-rapidapi-key": "YOUR_KEY",
        "x-rapidapi-host": "grok-x-intelligence.p.rapidapi.com",
        "Content-Type": "application/json"
    }
)

print(response.json())

The API returns people saying things like “looking for recommendations,” “anyone know a good…,” or expressing frustration with competitors—valuable buying signals.

Pricing

Compare this to $800+/month for enterprise tools.

Who Can Benefit

• Indie hackers adding social monitoring to SaaS products
• Agencies needing affordable client monitoring
• Startups performing competitive analysis
• Developers wanting X intelligence without building it from scratch

Getting Started

Grok X Intelligence is available on RapidAPI. A free tier is provided—no sales calls, no annual contracts required.

For questions, reach out to @CrawlingTheWeb.